Open events

The Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) is pleased to present Meleko Mokgosi’s first solo exhibition in Canada, Meleko Mokgosi: Imaging Imaginations, on view January 20 – June 10, 2023. Mokgosi is well known for his imposing and vivid multi-panel paintings that feature hyper-realistic depictions of Black figures within narrative scenes that prompt us to question the ethics of democracy, structures of power, and forms of knowledge. For Imaging Imaginations, Mokgosi debuts new works from his latest series, Spaces of Subjection, 2022. Within this growing body of work, Mokgosi draws from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writing in essays such as “The Subject and Power,” 1982, to consider questions of self-fashioning and self-determination within different physical spaces, cultural and national locations, and stages of maturation. The artworks on view query the role of images as societal forces that inform our sense of self and relation to others, or, in other words, subjecthood.

Meleko Mokgosi (1981) is a Botswanan-born US-based artist and educator. He is Associate Professor at the Yale University’s School of Art and co-founder of The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City. He received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011 and received a BA from Williams College in 2007. Mokgosi has participated in numerous residencies and has exhibited widely in both group and solo exhibitions. His most recent solo exhibitions including Currents 122: Meleko Mokgosi, Saint Louis Art Museum, MO (2022–2023); Pan-African Pulp, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2019–2022); Scripto-visual, The Current, Stowe, VT (2021); and Your Trip to Africa, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2020–2021).

Please note this event will be presented in English. Bilingual titles and descriptions are for reference purposes only.